with Steve Motenko, Barbara J Hunt and Rodney Dueck

Presented by Leading Beyond Ego LLC

Does this sound familiar?

"Some of my colleagues hide their points of view, while others monopolize conversations."

"That guy is often critical and defensive."

"Those two can’t seem to get along, always bickering."

"I’m nervous about my upcoming performance review. And to fit in at work, frankly, I have to suppress parts of who I am."

We all could be so much more effective... We could be so much happier at work … if only for … what?

Ego.

You know these ubiquitous workplace frustrations all too well. You’ve been tolerating them for years. Ego is the primary cause. It’s the number one obstacle to workplace effectiveness and satisfaction, and it’s the source of most unhealthy conflict.

Ego is how our old, automatic and unconscious behavior patterns show up at work. It’s the ego's fears that get in the way of speaking up authentically... of truly listening, beyond preconceptions and assumptions... of seeing the larger context... of living your values. It’s ego that suppresses creativity and out-of-the-box thinking. Ego that keeps us from taking bold, intelligent risks and making difficult decisions.

For our course, we don't use the psychotherapeutic definition of ego, in which a "strong healthy ego" is a good thing. We mean "ego" in the "street" sense: "My co-worker has an enormous ego." or "My boss's ego is fragile.". This is the "ego" that wisdom traditions both east and west have concerned themselves with for millennia.

This ego is the combination of masks we wear to represent ourselves in life.

How much time and emotional energy do you waste on ego’s demands for your attention? Ego distorts what we see. Its agendas distract us from staying focused on what’s most important. Its irritations and preoccupations can be relentless.

Ego is what gets triggered when we feel reactive. It can show up as defensive or offensive. Sometimes it demands control, sometimes it contracts from responsibility. Either way, it destroys potential, ruins relationships and erodes success – mine, yours, the team’s.

It’s so deeply ingrained that it doesn’t occur to us to challenge the problem that is ego. So we continue to tolerate the elephant in every room. But there is another way...

What if you could...

Honestly and easefully offer your point of view, even when controversial, with all your co-workers - even your boss.

Be part of a team in which everyone commits to not dominating, hiding, or monopolizing decisions.

Get everyone on your team to set aside their biases, to bring all perspectives to the table.

Help your colleagues prioritize the team and the mission over “turf” issues and office politics.

Grow creatively, learn from failure, play a bigger game.

Take 100% responsibility for your role.

"Beyond" Ego

You can access a more advanced self – with a more evolved set of motivations inside you. In this course, you will learn how to loosen the shackles of your ego and lead from that “beyond-ego” self – and help others do the same.

Whether you’re leading a company, a project team, or a group of volunteers – or you’re simply curious about how people can work together in more productive and satisfying ways – we invite you to join Leading Beyond Ego, a revolutionary nine-week online experience.

This interactive program offers a way of relating to your life and work that will help you discover higher capacities and develop stronger interpersonal connections. It will give you greater access to flexibility, flow and productivity in your daily work, and it will help lower your stress levels.

In Leading Beyond Ego, you’ll discover:

The devastating impacts of ego in the workplace

How to recognize ego in yourself, others, and the team (“collective ego”)

How to avoid the traps of ego, especially when under stress

What it means to “lead beyond ego,” and what makes this possible

Who you truly are when you authentically move beyond the limiting structures of ego

How to sustainably move beyond ego individually and collectively

The most essential practices for next generation leadership

Join us for this remarkable journey into "beyond-ego" leadership.

Comments from Past Participants

I just really appreciate this course. It’s what I’ve been longing for, hungry for, for so long … The work is fascinating.

~ F.P.

I am truly enjoying this course! The applicability of the homework or “practices” is so enriching and I feel like every week I’m newly challenged. The exercises such as Panning for Gold, the Six Faces of Ego Survey and the Deathbed Perspective I find very useful and know I will continue to utilize these techniques beyond the course. The Q&As are great! I like having this time to process the material together and the three of you and the Q&A participants have been very supportive; I’m very grateful for this.

~A.H.

The course is well designed and organized and I am getting a lot out of the material. It is a challenging subject with a great deal of self-awareness involved and holds huge potential for personal transformation. I especially appreciate the layered approach that builds gradually. Grounding ourselves with stakeholder feedback so we could focus in on areas for growth was very useful.

As our instructors I appreciate that you all bring your years of practice, experience, insights, personal stories/examples and full selves to the sessions. You all have such generosity and mature wisdom – individually and collectively. It is moving and powerful. I’m inspired.

It is also clear that you are all continuing to work with this material yourselves and are sojourners. That really makes it rich for me.

~J.P.

The course is so well done and it is such a gift to have the three of you as instructors. It has been a great experience.

~ L.P.

This has been an awesome experience.

~ P.B.

I have integrated your Six Faces of Ego as a lens for noticing and managing those tendencies in myself and others. I am noticing the quality of my interactions improving. I seem to have a more accurate read on dynamics with this framework and I feel I am responding to people and situations in a more attuned way.

People have been asking me about this class. I asked if they wanted to hear the description of the Six Faces. It was amazing how people responded with humor but also with a palpable change in behavior in the hours after the discussion. In particular two individuals who were dominating with "already knowing” and talking incessantly almost immediately stepped back and created some space. As a result there was much more vitality in the room.

~ J.P.

Who is this course for?

Anyone who desires to wield positive influence within an organization - regardless of positional authority.

Anyone who has glimpsed the damage that individuals’ egos can do to teams, to organizations, and to their missions.

Anyone curious about the possibilities that open up when people choose to source their intentions, their relationships, and their decisions from a place beyond their own ego.

This course offers a radical reorientation into a depth of perspective and motivation – moving away from singular, biased, personal, ego-based, unconscious and automatic behavior, and toward developing perspective, motivation and behaviors that consistently serve “the greatest good for the whole.”

Next-Generation Leadership: The Indispensable Capacity

The most essential internal move a leader can make is the shift from leading with ego – with all its limitations, blind spots, defensiveness and drivenness – to leading beyond ego. This is the master leadership practice for our time; the path toward overcoming the #1 obstacle to meaningful success.

In this course you will discover that the perspective you lead from is a choice. Making that choice will radically enhance the quality of your leadership.

Your shift in identity from ego toward beyond ego will change how you experience yourself, others and the world. Your willingness to face everything and avoid nothing in these three domains of relationship can transform both your leadership and your life.

Your ability to lead from beyond ego is driven by one significant capacity – the quality of your awareness. This begins with self-awareness, then widens to your insightful understanding of coworkers, customers and other stakeholders, and finally expands to the larger context in which you lead.

Your beyond-ego awareness is naturally grounded and adaptive – always present, alive and responsive to whatever happens. Your awareness and the resulting quality of your presence are always in a state of flux. But when you consciously and authentically bring that beyond-ego awareness into your interactions, your coworkers know it – in your tone of voice and your body language, which transmit far more than words.

A core truth about beyond-ego leadership is that you cannot fake it. For the ego this is scary. For your deeper Self, your beyond-ego Self, authenticity is a huge relief - no more need for pretense.

In Leading Beyond Ego we focus on you – the person who is leading – your sense of identity, your core motivations, and the inner source from which they arise. This is the terrain where the perspectives of both ego and beyond ego reside.

There is no doubt, our times are calling for leaders whose humanity and perspective are large enough to accurately see the biggest possible picture and to lead from that place.

Who is the Beyond Ego leader?

YOU when you’re at your best... when you’re fully present, available and responding to the needs of the moment. Leading beyond ego is the critical shift in perspective that precedes all others.

You're leading beyond ego when:

You stay curious about what you may not know

You have no need to control or micromanage

You do the right things for the right reasons – with no need to “look good”

You’re in the flow – you think creatively and act responsively – with no need to either fit in or stand out

You make room for opinions and suggestions from others – with no defensiveness, fear, frustration, or attachment to prior assumptions

You take bold, intelligent risks for a noble purpose

You’re aware of the interconnectedness and interdependence of caring – caring for yourself, for others (your team, your customers and all of your organization's stakeholders), and for the impact your company has on the world. This is what it means to act for the greatest good for all concerned.

Registration is currently closed.

Course Modules

Module 1

The Future of Leadership

The skills required of you as a leader today are extraordinarily complex. You have no choice but to face into accelerating change and constant uncertainty. And yet, within uncertainty lies enormous potential.
But how do you navigate when the emerging territory is unknown? Here, effective leadership requires a far more enlightened perspective, healthy and transparent motivations, and a strong, grounded vision.
As a leader holding that vision, you can’t afford to let your ego lead. The motivations of the ego are self-serving and narrow. Egoic behavior is habitual and reactive – the exact opposite of the creativity, flexibility and emotional availability you need to effectively collaborate with others.
Pry ego’s fingers off the steering wheel of your life and your leadership, and a new world of possibility arises. This is where we start.

Module 2

Revealing The Ego and Its Destructive Impacts in the Workplace

It's much easier to see ego in others than in ourselves. “She’s a control freak.” “He’s afraid to speak up.” “They’re constantly bickering.”

In this session, we’ll put ego under a magnifying glass. We’ll explore the different “faces” it presents, and we’ll take a compassionate look at its universal and impersonal nature. From this more objective vantage point, we can more easily acknowledge the adverse impacts of ego – especially our own.

When you learn to keep your ego in the passenger seat, you liberate yourself from the effects of your ego – and in the process, benefit everyone around you.

Module 3

Discovering What Lies Beyond Ego

There is another place from which our motivations can be sourced – a mindful way of relating to leadership and life, free from the narrow and self-serving conditioned behavior patterns of the ego.

This fresh perspective comes from a far more inclusive, more enlightened worldview. Once you learn how and then practice, you can choose to shift into this alternate perspective in any situation.

In this module, you’ll learn what it takes to consciously respond to the demands of leadership from this larger context.

Module 4

Exploring the Subtleties of the Ego

The ego is a cunning shape-shifter. It takes courage, humility and wisdom to notice and challenge your own ego. In this module, we’ll dig deeper into the many ways the ego warps what we see, distorts our meaning making, skews our behavior, and undermines our relationships.

When leaders become skilled in recognizing the various faces of ego, it transforms the way they lead. It allows them to make choices that focus on doing the right things for the right reasons and less on the personal need to be right or be in control.

This shift can transform the way you experience yourself – and the way others experience you. Leading beyond ego will enhance your ability to be compassionate and feel true empathy with others.

Module 5

Ego or Beyond Ego? You Are Always Choosing

Like it or not, our egos program us to see ourselves as the center of the universe. Our behavior is shaped by ego’s conscious and unconscious motivations. But when our perspective changes, everything changes – including our motivations. And our perspective is something we can choose to change.

We’ll discover what it takes to loosen the ego’s grip and choose conscious leadership. We’ll actively practice shifting our perspective in different workplace situations to reveal the emergent possibilities obscured by ego. This helps us to more accurately choose the “right thing to do.”

Module 6

Cultivating Relationships Beyond Ego

Leadership – like life – is all about relationships. But frustration and unresolved conflict can infect your interactions. Relationships are too often distorted by ego – by fear, anger, or defensiveness. Ego's need for control can lead to either dominant, avoidant, or passive-aggressive behavior.

These are all expressions of the ego’s limited perspective and compensatory behavior. But the depth of our listening and the quality of our beyond-ego intention and presence can change the conversation.

Imagine challenging relationships vibrating with possibility and inspiration. Imagine rebuilding trust and acting from shared purpose rather than self-protection or self-promotion. In these ways beyond-ego relationships become innovative, collaborative and powerful.

Module 7

Leading Groups Beyond Ego

Unrecognized or unacknowledged dynamics and norms affect how every group functions, limiting its effectiveness. These dynamics are surreptitiously driven by individual egos as well as the team’s (and the larger organization’s) collective ego.

Once we see the damage created by these unconscious shared agreements, we can choose and reinforce behavioral norms that are sourced beyond ego. We free up creative energy; we foster healthier relationships and enhance job satisfaction. Innovative, inclusive and adaptive solutions emerge between us from this shared beyond-ego awareness.

Module 8

Anchoring Beyond Ego

You can take the principles and practices of this course into your life to sustainably elevate your game as a leader. Choosing to lead beyond ego is simple, because it’s a choice, but it’s not necessarily easy.

The choice must be made moment by moment. We need practice. We need practical tools and techniques to recognize the subtle games the ego plays and to resist the momentum of ego.

This session will deepen the practice and strengthen your new habits of responding from beyond ego.

Module 9

Integrating and Connecting to the Larger Context

Learning to live and lead beyond ego will take your experience of work and life to a new level. As your perspective evolves, your ability to creatively meet the challenges of our time will continue to deepen and expand.

This maturation of capacity, connection and flow will foster your lifelong hunger to lead from beyond ego.

In this final session, we’ll focus on how to continue to build your beyond-ego capacities by taking the insights and practices of this course into the rest of your life. You will not do so alone; you’ll join an emerging worldwide shift in human consciousness - a shift already underway and well-documented. This is leadership worthy of the challenges and opportunities of our time.

What's Included

Nine 2-Hour Weekly Interactive Workshops

Virtual, with access via online streaming
or conference call

Leading Beyond Ego offers leading-edge online learning technologies that provide audiovisual presentations of key insights, opportunities for thought-provoking small group conversation, and the ability to answer your questions in real time, via a chat window or in dialogue between you and the course facilitators.

During each workshop you will:

Explore insights that illuminate the impacts of ego and how to lead from beyond ego

Participate in small-group exercises to experience the manifestations of your own ego and beyond ego awareness

Engage in brief meditations to enlarge and strengthen your inner awareness, key to liberating yourself and others from the impacts of ego.

Experiment with specific beyond ego practices that deepen your capacity to lead from beyond ego

Have opportunities to dialogue with course faculty

Eight 90-Minute Q & A Sessions

Virtual, with access via online streaming or conference call

We offer optional, but highly recommended, weekly Q & A’s to address your questions about Leading Beyond Ego principles and practices, and to support you in taking on new beyond-ego leader behaviors. In other courses we have noticed these sessions are often as valuable as the workshop sessions. There is space for you to explore your “real life” issues with course faculty and fellow participants.

During each Q & A session you will have the opportunity to:

focus on “how to” questions on the recognition of ego in self, the practice of beyond ego leadership and what the experience looks like and feels like

explore whatever you find challenging in your experience of ego and beyond ego

discover the universality of the voices of both ego and beyond ego – how someone else’s seemingly unique question is likely to resonate strongly with you

ask about your experience with meditation to maximize the surprising potential that inner awareness offers

Q & A sessions will be recorded and made available for listening or download within a day or two.

Nine Power Principles and Practices for Leading Beyond Ego

You can know all about the principles for Leading Beyond Ego and nothing may change. What matters is embodiment. We are not talking about perfection here. We are talking about your intention and practice.

Even when imperfectly expressed, clear intentions about what matters most transmit to those around you far more than ego could ever know or understand. You can experience what these principles offer only when you practice them - wholeheartedly. And the more you do it, the more obvious the benefits become.

For each Power Principle you will:

receive an introduction and a practice to use in your daily work, one each week

receive written materials that explore these principles more deeply

have the opportunity to share your experience and ask questions on a private discussion thread and in the Q & A sessions

The Workplace Benefits of Meditation

Ego is most dangerous when you don’t see a difference between who you are and your ego. When we realize that ego is not who we are but rather something we have – that’s when ego begins to lose its power. Meditation is the most effective practice for cultivating the ability to make this distinction.

Furthermore, regular meditation helps lower stress levels, and stress of course clouds our judgment. So meditation helps us make wiser decisions. It develops “big-picture” thinking and the capacity to take the perspective of “other” – the key to better relationships.

This expanded inner awareness helps you recognize ego in yourself and others and act less reactively to both. This benefit accrues to self-aware teams as well as to individuals.

During this course you will:

experience a brief guided meditation in every workshop and Q & A session

engage in a simple daily meditation practice

have time in each Q & A session to share your experience, ask questions, and learn best practices

There are many forms of meditation. The meditation approach we will suggest is simple, straightforward, practical, and focused on expanding your inner awareness.

Support

We want you to have an excellent experience of this course. If you have questions about any aspect of it, please contact us at support@leadingbeyondego.com and one of our team will get back to you. We strive to respond to all inquiries within 24 hours, Monday through Friday.

Faculty

We are an experienced, international team, drawn together by the desire to elevate the quality of leadership at this critical juncture in time, for the benefit of all. Together we believe that leading beyond ego is the one shift that precedes and enhances all other leadership capacities.

We have been doing this work personally, as a focus of our lives, for many years – including in our collaboration to develop this course.

Steve Motenko

Co-founder of Leading Beyond Ego, Steve Motenko is an executive coach specializing in leadership development. A former management trainer at Boeing, Microsoft, and the nonprofit Center for Ethical Leadership, Steve is currently Director of Programs for Path Forward Leadership Development.

He is the co-author of the leadership primer Land On Your Feet, Not On Your Face, and co-creator and co-host of The Boss Show, a Seattle radio show and podcast offering “workplace wisdom with heart and humor for anyone who is or has a boss.”

After graduating in psychology from Harvard University, Steve went on to an award-winning career as a journalist, and then a second career as a school music teacher. Steve’s most fulfilling and most impactful work has been his coaching work over the past 17 years. He has also studied for 7 years with evolutionary spirituality teacher Craig Hamilton, a process that has turbocharged his personal development.

Coaching with you is the best money I’ve spent in years. What value can you put on getting your life back? I guess it is true that when the student is ready, the teacher will appear, but I feel blessed that you are the one there to guide me.
D.M.

I cannot tell you how much wiser I feel as a result of your coaching. Thank you for everything you have given me to support my work and help me succeed. You are a remarkable person.
R.F.

Barbara J. Hunt

Barbara J. Hunt is the bestselling author of “Forgiveness Made Easy” and a forgiveness specialist. She works as a facilitator and coach, with many years’ experience in leadership training and governance, serving national and international clients.

Barbara is also part of a team of therapists with Vital Detox UK, a deliberately developmental organisation and the UK’s leading health retreat specialising in emotional and physical health. She holds a BA in Combined Studies (Child Psychology & Education) and CPBAB certificate in Counselling Studies and has studied and trained in various disciplines including NLP, Integral Theory, EFT, Evolutionary Spirituality, Strategic Intervention Coaching and Journey work.

'Barbara helped me shift an old and really difficult feeling of judgment and competitiveness that I had with a female colleague. Much as I'd tried I'd never succeeded in shifting this, even after sharing with her about it and seemingly coming to forgiveness. Her 'Soul Search' process, immaculately and sensitively guided, was nothing short of a miracle. I was soon to be working with the woman in question and the transformation in my feelings towards her were incredible. I just felt warm-hearted appreciation and love. And that has lasted over the year and through another event we both worked on. What a blessing. Barbara is unusually gifted as a coach and facilitator and I would recommend her to anyone.'
P.S., Event Director

Thank you very much for the processes. The forgiveness one you did with me really did cause a big shift of removing old stuff and sedimentation. A rewarding outcome....
M.R.

Rodney Dueck

Rodney Dueck is a retired physician and healthcare executive with experience in a variety of leadership roles over 23 years. He served the last 9 of those years as System Medical Director at the Park Nicollet Clinic in Minneapolis, Minnesota, then a 450 physician medical center.

His passion for this course is found in questions we all face. How is it that good people, each with a felt sense of good intentions and shared purpose end up in dysfunctional relationships that limit their individual and organizational potential? Why are we humans falling so far short of our obvious potential, and what positive practical steps can we take to make a difference?

For him, this course is a summation of nearly four decades of curiosity, study, learning and practice motivated by questions of this sort.

Rod Dueck and I have been friends and colleagues since 1998. We did research and gave lectures on human transformation. Rod’s long standing interest is in transformative leadership. He is uniquely qualified to address the many guises of ego and getting past the ego.
T.C.

With decades of passionate study and real-world practical application, Rod Dueck has a profound understanding of the ego’s influence in our daily interactions and its impact in the larger context of human endeavor. Most importantly, Rod’s ability to inspire others to move beyond ego is compelling. He embodies what he teaches.
A.K. - Close friend of ten years

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is this program for? Who is the target audience?

Leading Beyond Ego is for anyone who wants to take their leadership to the next level. As a leader, regardless of your title or position, you recognize that the quality of your leadership depends more on your inner state than on any externals. When you minimize the damage done by ego (yours and others’), you maximize your capacity to inspire and empower your coworkers and stakeholders. This is what matters most as a leader. This is what will help your team, organization, or company reach its highest potential.

Why is this program worth my time and money?

Ego is the most disruptive and destructive force in the workplace. The impact of ego shows up in every aspect of business life – in unproductive meetings, in limited thinking, in self-sabotaging and team-sabotaging behaviors, and in challenging conversations and the lack of challenging conversations.You will learn practical, proven tools for reducing the influence of ego in your life and your team.

You will also learn how to enhance the quality of your interactions in every relationship you have – with customers, teams, bosses – all stakeholders – by practicing the power principles taught in this course.

Most importantly, you will learn how to recognize your own ego and liberate others from its impacts.

What will I get out of this course?

You will discover the harm that unconscious, ego-driven behavior causes to relationships, effectiveness and satisfaction at work.

You will learn how to recognise ego in yourself and others and - how to operate from a higher set of motivations and values altogether.

You will learn how to manage the impact of individual and collective egos

You will learn tools and practices for creating intentions, interactions, and behaviors sourced outside your own ego.

What technology do I need?

Leading Beyond Ego uses Zoom. You need no special software. It will download automatically when you click the link, if you don’t already have it installed

For the audio for each session, you can call in by phone or use your computer. If your internet signal is not stable, use the phone.

If you have Internet access (recommended), you can also access the webinar video via your computer or smartphone – and if you choose, you can be on camera in your small-group dialogues, .

When you click on the link at the beginning of each session, you’ll access the webinar screen. It’s a highly interactive format and we’ll talk you through the basics.

At one or two points during each session, you’ll be placed into breakout groups whether you’re connected via phone or via computer. You won’t need to do anything with your screen or phone; all you’ll need to do is contribute to your group’s conversation.

You can message the webinar hosts at any time during the call, using a chat window.

Are scholarships available?

We’re a small start-up so we have limited resources, but we don’t want to turn away leaders who could benefit from this work. Scholarship preference will be given to individuals with genuine need who show promise for bringing the principles of the course into their organizations. To request a scholarship, please contact our support team with a brief description of (1) why you’re requesting a scholarship and (2) the contexts in which you’re intending to bring Leading Beyond Ego principles and practices.

What is the minimal commitment?

To get full value from the program, allow two hours for each weekly webinar and an average 10-15 minutes per day of your own personal explorations, experiments and reflections. Each week, you will apply what you found most important and valuable in the webinar material, to your own leadership.

We will also offer weekly 90-minute Q & As, but they’re not required if you’re short on time. Recordings of the Q & As will be available afterwards.

Participation live at every webinar is highly recommended, because key interactive learning will develop through small-group conversations. In these dialogues with others who are also practicing leading beyond ego, you will share insights, deepen your understanding about the subtleties of ego, explore this new “beyond ego” perspective, and support and challenge each other to make the changes real in your workplace.

What do I do if I need to miss a session?

We encourage live attendance because elements of our program are dialogue-based and designed to be experiential. Deep real-time engagement with others will enhance your practice, understanding and embodiment of the principles of leading beyond ego.

However, if you need to miss a session, we will post the URL of the audio and video recording so you can catch up with the material as soon as possible.

What happens in the small-group dialogues?

In these confidential conversations, we invite a tone of curiosity and openness – authenticity and presence, both listening for depth, and speaking from depth.

In this confidential space, you will be invited to engage with the material for that particular week’s theme. You will offer your perspectives, your experiences and your evolving understanding around (a) your exploration of ego and (b) your practice and intentions around leading beyond ego.

Your hosts will lead interactive and experiential exercises which you will also debrief in your small groups.

We’ll encourage you to offer feedback, support and healthy challenges to your group mates.